[jonas21]

I'm an independent app developer too, and I share your frustrations. Sometimes I wish I had the luxury of walking away from the App Store -- but with ~80% of my revenue coming from iOS, I can't do that.

Similarly, I can't give up on owning a Mac because you need one to develop for iOS.

On one hand, it's super annoying whenever Apple rejects an update for some arbitrary reason. But on the other hand, making a living by writing and selling my own apps has been a dream of mine pretty much forever -- and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along.

[7tsfmCAusrQ]

I feel your pain. I would encourage you to grow and develop your audience on Android. There is a big market there to be tapped, which with some effort could equal or exceed your revenue from Apple. It's much easier to write cross-platform apps now than it was five years ago, thanks to frameworks like Flutter.

Of course, Apple would like to have us all believe that app developers couldn't make a living by writing and selling apps before the Invention of the App Store, and that they have done us all a great favor, one that warrants us paying them 30% of our income.

However, the reality is, this has always been possible. As early as the beginning of the 80s, indy developers made millions writing games for the ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, the Amiga, and so on. You just had to work with a publisher or distributor, of which there were hundreds and it was a free market. In the 90s millions could be made from DOS and Windows apps in the same way. In the early '00s, it became possible to self-publish on the web and our apps would be indexed and marketed for us by search engines; we didn't even need a publisher, but could still choose to go through one if the value add merited the cost.

So there has been no radical innovation, no Invention that has changed what is possible for us to achieve as app developers. It's arguably a little bit easier to get our apps to market than it used to be, but given how onerous Apple's "guidelines" have become, I'm not even sure that is true. Writing websites serving apps and integrating with checkout engines just isn't that difficult... and most apps still need marketing to succeed because being listed in the App Store is not by itself sufficient.

The only thing that has changed, now that the mobile computing revolution has almost reached saturation point and the majority of screen time by consumers is on mobile devices, is that we are now all forced to publish through a single store on each platform, and we are permitted no alternative if we want to reach our customers. Equally, our customers are permitted no alternative way to obtain our products. There is no competition between publishers on Apple's platform, because there is only one publisher, Apple, by fiat of Apple; and we are now forced to pay a 30% tax, a figure which is not challenged by the usual mechanisms of competition, and supply and demand, which make markets efficient.

[donmcronald]

> and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along

Isn't that more a result of mobile devices opening up a new market? I agree the app stores made a lot of difference initially when they provided a lot of visibility (ie: free advertising) to small developers, but those days are over aren't they?

[amelius]

> On one hand, it's super annoying whenever Apple rejects an update for some arbitrary reason. But on the other hand, making a living by writing and selling my own apps has been a dream of mine pretty much forever -- and something that I didn't think would be possible before the app stores came along.

I wonder how many apps actually are ramen-profitable on the App store. I often think that the dream of becoming rich (or even making a living) through the App store is just a myth perpetuated by Apple to attract developers; and nonsense from a statistical point of view. Do we have any numbers?